217 Second Avenue

Residence P is the parlor floor of an 1850 house, roughly 1,233 square feet running front to back one flight above Second Avenue. The foyer carries the full original height, thirteen feet three inches, and the living and dining rooms sit in line behind stained glass pocket doors that still slide. Wide plank floors, crown moldings, a ceiling medallion, and Corinthian columns are the house's own work rather than reproductions, and a wood burning fireplace anchors the living room.

One bedroom and one bath, which on this floor plate buys unusually large rooms instead of more of them. The kitchen is windowed, a detail that follows from a house only four stories tall and twenty six feet wide, where every room still reaches an exterior wall.

217 Second Avenue went up around 1850, a Greek Revival house that picked up Italianate detailing, four stories over a basement and about twenty five feet ten inches wide. It is still a walk up. At some point the single house was divided, and it is recorded today as the Astor House Condominium, five residences with basement storage and a planted roof terrace.

Five apartments in a house built for one family is close to the smallest a Manhattan condominium gets. There is no lobby, no staff, and no elevator, and the building is only marginally busier now than the day it was finished.

The apartment changed hands in October 2024 and the restoration that followed was completed in 2025. It went past surfaces. The kitchen was rebuilt as a windowed room around a Sub-Zero refrigerator and a vented washer and dryer, the climate control was replaced, and the apartment now runs whole home water filtration and air purification. The fireplace was restored to working order.

It is offered fully furnished, with the natural materials and organic linens selected as part of the same project rather than dressed in afterward. The lease carries the furniture, which is the part that makes this an unusual thing to rent rather than an unusual thing to buy.

The block sits at the northern edge of the East Village, a block and a half below Stuyvesant Square, the four acres Peter Gerard Stuyvesant sold the city for five dollars in 1836. When this house was built, Second Avenue was the main street of Kleindeutschland, the German quarter that ran north to Fourteenth Street. By the 1910s the same stretch was the Yiddish Rialto.

The theater that survives from it stands two blocks south at Twelfth Street: Harrison Wiseman's Louis N. Jaffe Art Theater, opened in November 1926 for Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theatre, a New York City landmark since 1993 and a cinema now. Union Square, the Greenmarket, and the subway lines under it are a few minutes on foot.

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